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User blog:Readerno33/Taking It Seriously No 1
As promised, here’s the first entry in the Taking It Seriously regarding Spiderman’s “Pied Piper of New York Town”; hope you all enjoy. To start off my Taking It Seriously series I want to focus on something I put up on the wiki: the 1981 Spiderman episode “The Pied Piper of New York Town.” Of course, this episode isn’t going to come out well under scrutiny because it was written in the 1980s where storyline wasn’t given as much detail as today, but it’s the place I’m going to start this series off. At the heart of the episode is a hypnotic trope that appears in places over this wiki: musical hypnosis. We see it in several different places on this wiki like Sharon Apple’s musical hypnosis in Macross Plus or the musical riots in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; the closest equivalent to “The Pied Piper” is W.I.T.C.H.’s Horn of Hypnos and the horn’s first appearance in the “Walk This Way” episode. Both “The Pied Piper” and “Walk This Way” involve an increasing number of people including a central hero coming under the control of hypnotic music. In “Walk This Way” the hypnotized people are called trance marchers, so let’s call this The Trance Marcher Strategy. So Mysterio, the central villain in “Pied Piper,” is using a Trance Marcher Strategy, but unlike “Walk This Way” the Mysterio’s deployment of the strategy has a few places where I can’t take it seriously, so let me lay those places out. Let give a brief rundown of the episode first (if you want to skip this, go here to see the wiki page devoted to the episode): Mysterio uses a disco to try out his hypnotic music and brings Spiderman in to fight off his hypnotized patrons; when Spiderman gets out of the disco, Mysterio hypnotizes nearby pedestrians to locate and attack Spiderman; Mysterio then goes to ESU and hypnotizes the president of the university and the entire campus to begin marching towards a military base outside of New York; as the speaker van leading the trance marchers travels through the city more people become marchers and follow the van; Spiderman attempts to stop the van, but the van plays music that turns him into a trance marcher; Mysterio orders his marchers to carry Spiderman into a bank and lock him in; the trance marchers continue onto the base while Spiderman comes out of his trance and escapes from the vault; the soldiers at the base become trance marchers and give Mysterio control of a nuclear missile; Spiderman comes and clogs ups the speakers of the van, thereby freeing everyone from the trance. So where does “Pied Piper” go wrong? 'Point #1: Mysterio’s open use of trance marching' Mysterio uses trance marching too freely in the beginning; if the story were more realistic, Mysterio turning pedestrians into trance marchers would reveal his strategy way too soon. In contrast, Cedric in “Walk This Way” blows the horn once, makes the rebels attacking his position into trance marchers, and then makes them work on his catapult. Cedric is far more precise in his usage of the strategy: he creates trance marchers and then brings them into his army. Mysterio, if we consider things realistically, would be tipping the authorities to his plans. When the pedestrians came out of the trance, they would wonder how they lost time and that search might lead to searching the disco and finding the hypnotic music. So “Pied Piper” is going about using the Trance Marcher Strategy in an overly simplistic way. Point #2: Spiderman’s under your control and you do WHAT???!!! I think th e title captures the problem rather elegantly; Mysterio makes Spiderman into a trance marcher and can have Spiderman do anything he wants and all Mysterio does is lock Spiderman in a vault to die. Cedric turns Hay-lin into a trance marcher and orders her to attack the other guardians; Lex Luthor, in The Batman, doses Superman with kryptonite laced mind control spores and has him attack Batman and Robin; the examples of villains getting mind control over heroes are quite plentiful on this wiki, and yet Mysterio blows his opportunity royally by trying to destroy Spiderman rather than using his superhero trance marcher in his strategy. Mysterio fails to see that he could have Spiderman, NYPD, the army and the nuclear missile all under his control. And if some forces were to try and stop him, they might have some of their forces become trance marchers and increase his ranks even more. He has a potentially winning strategy and yet he plays it for the loss. And if he were to use Spiderman that reveals another point… Point #3: You only have one speaker van??!! The Spiderman as trance marcher line of thought says you need at least two vans to make the strategy as Mysterio plays it really work: one van to lead the trance marchers and one to keep Spiderman a trance marcher and under wraps. In “Walk This Way,” Hay-lin becomes one of the trance marchers, marches along with everyone else, and uses her magic once Cedric orders the marchers to attack the guardians. But Hay-lin looks no different from any trance marcher amongst the group; so, having her among the trance marchers provides an element of surprise. Spiderman would stand out no matter where he is among the trance marchers. So rather than have him among the trance marcher, you would hide him somewhere else should anyone try to take out the trance marcher speaker van. And yet there’s only one speaker van as it fits into the oversimplified storyline. So what would I do in this scenario? First, I wouldn’t be as obvious as Mysterio; no telling Spiderman my base of operations is here!! I would use the disco to test the hypnotic music out but only in short amounts of time, no longer than 20 minutes. The patrons may not pay much attention to losing 20 minutes in a club as to losing 2 hours. Second, I’d have three speaker vans to make the city trance marchers. Mysterio is right to start at ESU, but I’d expand upon that strategy using the disco and the second van to gather trance marchers there. Two locations and two vans mean more trance marchers in less time. When Spiderman comes, I make him a trance marcher and deploy the third van to Spiderman’s location and keep him there. The rest plays out like the cartoon: have the marchers go to the base and gain control of it. Between the NYPD trance marchers, the army trance marchers and trance marcher Spiderman, I would have enough forces to hold off any threat and perhaps increase my trance marchers. And that is how you play the Trance Marcher Strategy for the win in that scenario. So that’s all I have to say about “The Pied Piper of New York Town,” which brings my first Taking It Seriously ''to a close. The next entry of this series will stay with Spiderman and look at the “Swarm” episode of ''Spiderman and His Amazing Friends. Category:Blog posts